


Blood of the Stars

by coffeehousehaunt



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: A.L.I.E. 1.0 chip, Alternate Canon, Fix-It, Gen, If You Squint - Freeform, Kind of an odd POV, Lexa Dies, Little bit creepy, Little bit of blood, Little bit of body horror, Post-307, and then comes back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 02:25:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6311404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeehousehaunt/pseuds/coffeehousehaunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The animal that adapts--</p>
<p>Survives."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood of the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Fix-it piece. Hopefully will be more of a prologue-type piece to something longer, but for now it's just a stand-alone (and kinda creepy) piece where Lexa (kinda) lives.

All good animals (animals that last) want to survive. This one wakes up soaked in black in a cold throat, and understands in its binary, on-off way—

Too cold. This wasn’t the place to wake up. 

There is no “should” here. No “why”. Less “blood”, less “water at night”; more “sky with stars”. More “stars” than “sky”. More spark than darkness. This, if you have to ask, is “why”. 

The temperature is all wrong, but it’s not temperature that it needs; it’s that spark. 

And that won’t be enough, either; sooner or later, it _does_ need heat. And—it needs a current. So it sends out its appendages and looks for one; a source, a conduit, anything. 

What it finds are hallways. Empty hallways. Quiet and dark. But the taste is there, even if it’s faint and soured—

This is the language it speaks: on-off, open-close. Potassium and sodium. 

The animal is equipped with what it needs to survive, and what it needs to survive is electrical charge. But it can’t generate more all on its own, so time is limited unless it can reach a power source. 

But things that generate heat, things that throw off sparks, that sustain themselves—they’re closed-circuit; and it takes time to convince anything that it should allow something else to share its space, to live intertwined with the live circuit itself. It is, after all, a balance; sodium and potassium. Too much or too little of one or the other, and the spark stops, the heartbeat stops, and the animal dies. 

It takes time to build out the infrastructure to work with (or within) another self-sustaining creature. 

This one, though; this one is already built out—chemical debris aside (that can be cleaned away). 

The ideal place is in the brain stem, closer to the chemical center, the center of neural activity. But there isn’t time to float through this one’s bloodstream and hopefully end up on a trip to the spinal column. This one’s blood isn’t going anywhere. And the animal only has enough reserves for this first advance, for this burst. But, as it turns out, it doesn’t need to reach the spinal column physically to tap into its resources. 

And the blood, although oxygen-starved, shivers night-sky stars against the dark. 

Inhibition and stimulation are two sides of the same coin. Sodium and potassium. Off and on. Inhibition may be the primary strategy, but it’s clear that’s useless here, and the animal that adapts—

Survives.


End file.
